Photos From the Last Few Weeks

All bundled up on a chilly not-quite-fall morning

Quietly reading one weekend morning

Things Sophie brought me to help me feel better one day when I was sick

Sleeping with her pillow pulled around her head.  Why?  I know not.

Face painting at Grandma's church

Jon-boy sporting his birthday gift

Sophie and Ryan wearing their peace shirts for their Peace Day Parade

Morning Walk to the Park

Well, more than two weeks ago I posted that I was very sick.  As of today I still haven't completely recovered, but I am feeling much better.  My only remaining ailments are a persistent cough and some lower back pain that has been plaguing me the past week.  I'm hoping that soon goes away.

I haven't done any sort of exercise for the last three weeks.  My last workout was on Labor Day; my sickness came in the middle of the night that night.  This morning I was feeling up for a leisurely walk, so the girls and I walked down to the park while Charles was still sleeping.

A blurry picture of Sophie walking beside me while holding my hand

Hannah riding ahead on the scooter

As we arrived at the park entrance, Hannah took a spill off the scooter.  It is downhill into the park, and she had taken on more speed than she could control.

She scraped up her knees quite a bit but was very brave.  I asked if she wanted to head home or stay at the park for a bit first, and she was up for staying.  So the girls played on the playground for awhile and then we took a walk around the half-mile park loop before heading home.

Photo we took while taking a break halfway around the park loop

It felt good to get out in the crisp morning air and get a bit of exercise, and I enjoyed doing it with my girls.

Many other events have occurred while I've been sick, including Hannah's birthday party.  I plan to update these on the blog over the next few days.

So Sick

No pictures today.  Trust me, you wouldn't want to see them anyway.  I am in my third day of being knocked flat with what can only be the flu, in early September.  What is that about?  I have had a temperature of 101 degrees that occasionally goes up or down a bit but tends to hover there.  My head hurts, my body aches, and I alternate between cold chills and hot flashes.  Last evening I also started coughing a bit, which is no fun with the head still hurting.  These symptoms started in the night on Monday.  I have not been to school at all this week, except a brief period on Tuesday morning to get sub plans in place.  I'm hoping today will show some improvement so that I can teach at least one day this week.

Charles had these same symptoms, though his fever was not as high, over the long Labor Day weekend.  His lasted for about three days and then turned into a very yucky sounding bronchial cough.  He still doesn't feel great but is better than the weekend when he slept most of each day.  I've been resting at home, doing some reading, taking naps, and drinking lots of fluids: hot tea when I'm chilled and ice water when I'm sweaty.  Being sick is no fun!

Making "Baskits"

The store finally opened yesterday.

The young entrepreneurs requested that I come be their first customer.  When I entered, I was directed to see the lady at the front desk.

 She inquired as to what exactly I wanted.  When I mentioned that I was in the market for a "baskit" (of course), she directed me to the creative mind behind the enterprise.

Here I placed my order for exactly the type of "baskit" I wanted.  I requested one with a flower theme.  They told me I could wait there for my "baskit" to be made or I could leave and they would deliver it when it was ready.

Later on, one of the young entrepreneurs took some time to advertise.

Her repeated refrain was "FALL! FALL!" to indicate that the Baskit Shop would be ushering in the new season with "baskits" in autumn themes.  At this point I was informed that my flower-themed "baskit" I ordered would now be tree-themed.  Sounds good to me.  They even had flyers and signs to advertise the seasonal special.

 

The front desk lady thought her job was too easy (and perhaps too boring) so she got busy creating pictures of her own.

Finally my completed "baskit" was delivered to my desk while I was out for a run.  It includes trees (for the fall theme) and my favorite color, pink.  Isn't it lovely?

Food Preserves 2012

Well, I'm just about done preserving all I'm going to for this year.  I've listed below everything that we've "put up" this summer.  I'm hoping having it recorded here will help us know how much we need next year, based on what we actually end up using.  Here's what my canned storage areas look like in the basement:

Tomato and apple products, white potatoes in buckets

Canned peaches and jams, empty canning boxes

Potatoes - 2 5-gallon buckets
Applesauce - 41 pints
Peaches - 58 quarts
Strawberry jam - 24 half-pints (4 given)
Corn - 25 quarts frozen
Diced tomatoes - 32 pints, 7 quarts
Tomato salsa - 15 pints
Marinara sauce - 17 pints (16 canned, 1 frozen)
Peach salsa - 8 pints
Fresh salsa - 8 pints
Apple pie filling - 7 quarts
Shredded zucchini - 9 quart bags frozen (3 given)
Squash puree - 5 pints
Cherry tomatoes - 2 pints
Catsup - 12 pints
Tomato juice - 6 pints
Pesto - 11 pucks frozen (1/3 cup each)
Pumpkin puree - 5 1/2 pints frozen
Pumpkin butter - 13 half-pints frozen, 1 pint given away
Sweet potatoes -

I'll update above once I process the pumpkins and we dig up the sweet potato vines to see what (if anything) grew from them. (UPDATE: The sweet potatoes did not produce any tubers to speak of.  Each plant had a couple of small little potatoes about two inches in length and half an inch in diameter.  They weren't able to grow enough during the prime summer months to store anything under ground, I guess.)

Pesto

Yesterday I had the girls pick all the leaves off our four basil plants.  We're ready to shut the garden down for the winter, and I wanted to make pesto for freezing before that happens.

Basil plants picked clean (plus a lot of weeds)

I gave about half the leaves to mom.  With what I had left I was able to make four batches of pesto using the recipe from Simply in Season.  I subbed walnuts for pine nuts (poor man's pesto!) and chicken stock for half the olive oil (to keep the calorie count down).  I was licking the spoon between batches, and it's good stuff!  This year I decided to freeze it in muffin tins, figuring that one puck will do for each meal we need pesto for.  The recipe says it makes about 1 cup, so each puck is probably about 1/3 cup of pesto.

Ready for freezing

Found the following sign outside the playroom the other evening:

Unfortunately, I haven't seen this "baskit" shop be open yet!  Will update if it ever opens.

Catsup Fail

Today began the long Labor Day 3-day weekend.  I decided I would make some catsup with the 20+ tomatoes from the garden.

Scraggly-looking blighty tomatoes, but good for catsup!

I chose the "Smooth Catsup" recipe out of the Esther Shank Mennonite cookbook because I was hoping that it's smooth-ness would make it palatable to Hannah, who is really our only catsup-eater in the household.  It called for 6 pints of tomato juice, among other things, so I began by getting the tomatoes ready to juice.

Sue allowed me to borrow her strainer again this weekend.  I quickly learned that juicing tomatoes is much messier than straining apples for applesauce.

What a mess!

The recipe said to cook the catsup mixture for one hour and then add Clearjel or cornstarch to thicken it.  I cooked it for over an hour and added significantly more thickening agent (first Clearjel, then cornstarch when I ran out of the other) than what the recipe calls for, but it just never thickened up in a satisfactory manner.  I'm thinking maybe I wasn't cooking the mixture at a hot enough temperature to thicken it down enough.

I ended up with over 12 pints when I should have had about 10 based on the recipe and a half that I was cooking, which probably means I didn't cook the tomato sauce down enough.

I'm waiting to see if it thickens or sets some as it cools.  I'll know the answer to that in the morning.  If not, I guess I'll have some juicy-type stuff that I can throw into soup recipes or whatnot.  I also canned 6 pints of plain tomato juice since I ended up with more juice than what I needed for the catsup.

My most significant discovery today is that my oven runs anywhere from 25 to 50 degrees cooler than it should.  I've been frustrated all summer long at my apparent inability to successfully bake quick breads.  This oven shortfall helps explain why my breads were browning on the outside but still gummy and too moist on the inside.  I guess I'll need to start setting my oven hotter than what the recipe calls for.